October 28, 2008
On February 25, 1917, Russian soldiers serving Tsar Nicholas II in St. Petersburg faced a choice. On November 4, 2008, Americans voters will stand in the same position. They must choose between a crooked, bumbling oligarchy prone to starting futile wars”and a ravening, reckless mob. While it’s mostly made up of citizens rightly enraged, the mob is led (or will soon be led) by vicious ideologues who promise to persecute Christianity. (Be patient, I will explain.)
There is no third living option, no better Tsar ready to reign. That option was tried, has failed. If the soldiers fight to save the Tsar, they preserve a regime that sent their brothers to die without meaning, without rifles”in a faraway land, for lies. They will save the elite that let the monk Rasputin set national policy, which bankrupted and bled their Fatherland. Surely, the new men grabbing for power must be better. How could they be worse?
The mob is shoving through the snowy square, chanting and screaming, blood already on its hands. The officers”fat men who”ve never missed a meal or seen the front”are rushing up and down the line, urging soldiers to follow orders. Their moustaches are immaculately groomed, but they quiver. For the first time in their military careers, these men really are afraid. The mob is 1,000 feet away. Now 500 feet, and charging. You hear the order: “FIRE!” What do you do?
This cheerful scene is what faces American voters next week. I needn”t remind most readers how badly the Tsarist party has governed. Or point out that the new heirs to the throne are clustered with Rasputins. If we turn back the insurgents at the gate, the old guard will chuckle and muddle right along, slowly wrecking the country.
What happens if the radicals win? If we join the mob, or support a hapless pretender (in some third party) and fire into the air?
I”ll tell you one thing, just one, that will happen, if Barak Obama is elected with a large Congressional majority“with perhaps enough votes in the Senate to quash a filibuster. And that one thing should be enough.
Senator Obama has promised to sign the so-called “Freedom of Choice Act,” which would repeal every restriction on abortion in every American state, right up through the ninth month. But then, we knew that about Barack, the whole infanticide thing.
There’s more. The FOC Act raises abortion to (in its own words) a “fundamental right.” According to legal analysts at the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops, the act’s language is so sweeping that it will snuff out any state’s “conscience” clause”the laws allowing hospitals, doctors, and nurses not to take part in abortions. To do so would amount to illegal discrimination, denying a citizen her fundamental right. Christian hospitals could no more decline to perform abortions than they can currently refuse to operate on black people.
So President Obama and his congressional supermajority would force every Christian hospital, doctor, or nurse either to abandon their faith, or go out of business. By federal law, believing Christians would be banned from a major industry (and apostolate). This is literally equivalent to a law banning faithful Jews from owning newspapers.
History tells us that steps such as this aren”t where religious persecutions end. It’s where they begin. Things are already scary enough in neighboring Canada, where Christians are now routinely hauled up before human rights tribunals for repeating what the Bible teaches concerning sex. Who knows what some Obama-appointed judge, 20 years from now, will make of a pastor whose sermons attacked the “fundamental right” of women to kill their children? How many churches and seminaries will face crippling civil judgments and have to close?
It can happen here. It is about to happen here.
Unless we obey our worthless officers, and fire on the mob. With all that in mind, I”m endorsing Tsar Nicholas II”er, John McCain”this November 4.
